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Our current site consists of several pages of products- 5 pages of books, 2 of supplies, 3 of patterns and some other pages to do with a popular craft. I have pictures of all products ON the pages, with descriptions of each product on the page and an order button which runs a very simple CGI script "shopping cart". We are typically found because people go to google, altavista, whatever and type in "101 ways to do this craft" and the autors name, or whatever. And great, WE show up, they click the link, go to one of our books pages, for example, and place an order.
It's been suggested that it would be easier and cleaner if we move to a more complex sophisticated shoppig cart system like oscommerce or similar. Cool, pages would be much smaller (a books page can take 2 to 3 minutes to load, but we warn folks of this, but they load in order so there is something to look at and read while the rest of the page loads below)
Some claim it would be easier to add product (after looking at the docs, I'm not so sure!)
My BIIIG question is this - if we move to an ecommerce package where all the descriptions are in a database, and the raw HTML code does not contain book titles, descriptions, etc - will we still be found? Now the pages are static, so it's like any other page - it gets indexed and the page can be searched. I'm a bit confused on how the commerce packages really work and how SEs interact, or don't interact, with them. I simply do not know. Now I add product by adding a table, putting in the photos, adding the description, then a "form" which has an order button.
I could learn the packages, I'm sure - but I want to be found, I want customers to still be able to look for "how to make this thing" pattern, or "Jill's super ruler" acccessory and have people actually find our site, get a link to the very page it's actually on, like they do now.
Can anyone explain how google, altavista and others handle shopping cart systems? Or dynamic content?
Pros?
Cons?
Would we lose the ability of people to find a specific product on our site?
Shadows Papa
[edited by: agerhart at 3:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2004]
[edit reason] removed political comment [/edit]
- uses search engine friendly URLs (OSCommerce does)
- allows for individual meta tagging of the products in the catalog (OSCommerce does not to my knowledge)
Keep in mind, that you're biggest challenge is finding a programmer that understands your marketing objectives and takes that into account when designing your site. The most issues I've had with dynamic sites is that they're not designed with SEO in mind. Therefore, I spend much of my time fixing issues that shouldn't be there in the first place.
You're probably looking at a custom solution. I have yet to find an out-of-the-box catalog/cart that is search engine friendly.
If anyone does, please let me know. ;)
Fortunately, there are standard mods available from others that use & hack osc for you to plug in without reinventing the wheel. Make sure you get rid of the SID's for the robots.
My BIIIG question is this - if we move to an ecommerce package where all the descriptions are in a database, and the raw HTML code does not contain book titles, descriptions, etc - will we still be found?
The DB just stores that info until someone or something requests a page. Once a page is requested, your server sticks the template & the data together so the visitor gets it all toegther, not separate.
As long as you do the mods for osc, the search engines should like the site.
One bit of warning, the installation and modification of osc can be a bear. I'm not a programmer & wouldn't dream of trying to learn php/mysql on osc. I just have one of those nice guys with the propeller beanies do it for me.
out of the box OsCommerce does not allow for manipulation of individual meta tags but Linda's Header Tag contribution fixes this.
Shadows Papa
Individual meta tagging of products and categories requires some manipulation of the code, I found no contribution which did it "right", but in fairness have not tried lindas modification above.
That said, I appreciate OSC as one of the best tools out there for what it is, and am using it right now for one live domain and some number of domains which are being built out. The live domain handles some subset of the widgets my company sells, and within a month was outperforming a prorietary site I inherited that sells our entire collection of widgets. I think OSC is a great project just wanted to voice here that some familiarity with php and a desire to get ones feet wet really should be a prerequisite if you want to use it and expect good search results.
